Do you use Twitter, but don’t spend your March in Austin? You may be confused by “#sxsw” showing up in your stream. A new site can help make sense of the gibberish “hash tags” spouted by some of the people you follow.
The legendary Billboard charts are now open for mixing, not by DJs, but by programmers. Billboard, a service of Nielsen Business Media, has a new API that lets developers search and read information from all the Billboard historical charts. The initial offering is its Chart service and later on Billboard will “roll out the Artist and Track services to add even more depth and perspective.” the API is a simple REST interface that developers can send HTTP GET requests to in a familiar service/version/resource fashion. We’ve added a new Billboard API profile with details.
Social movie review web site FilmCrave recently released a new API (our FilmCrave API Profile) that provides developers with access to various types of content, including member movie reviews, movie plots, and movie ratings. Originally developed as an API for use by one of its business partners, FilmCrave decided to make the API publicly available in order to encourage third parties to integrate FilmCrave’s content with other web sites.
Mashup software provider JackBe has issued a challenge for folks to come up with a user-friendly (read: non-techie) definition of the term enterprise mashup. Although you won’t necessarily earn much money (a $50 Amazon gift card), you will earn the honorary title: Mashup CEO.
There are many ways for websites to tap into online social networking services to allow their users to connect with each other. Now, for publishers who want to add social network functions to already existing websites, Yahoo! has announced their new Updates API, a web service that provides permission-based access to the actions of any user with a Yahoo! account. As part of Yahoo!’s Open Strategy (Y!OS), this API essentially allows developers to treat the Yahoo! network as a social networking platform (for more on Y!OS see our coverage of the initial Y!OS announcement and their YQL launch).
Google this week released a new API for Friend Connect (our new Friend Connect API Profile), its relatively new service that enables social networking features to be easily added to any existing web site (utilizing copy and paste code that leverages OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial). The API allows developers to tap into some of the core features of Friend Connect.
Last week the world’s largest annual computer expo, the CeBIT conference, was held in Hannover, Germany. While CeBIT still covers the latest physical advances in things like consumer electronics, server hardware, security and access devices, etc, this year there was also a focus on the application development side of technology. This included a large area devoted to open-source and a number of panels devoted to general education on topics such as Virtual Worlds, Digital Content Distribution, as well as a panel I moderated on Business Solutions with Enterprise Mashups.
In a well-received move, major British newspaper The Guardian has opened up access to its content and data sets to third parties. The Guardian’s Open Platform comprises both an API (our new Guardian API Profile) and a Data Store that provide access to multimedia content and data sets respectively. The Content API includes approximately 1,000,000 articles that go as far back as 1999 and in some cases much further back.
In less than sixty days since the private beta release of its API, Portland-based Shizzow has now released its API (our Shizzow API Profile) to the public. If you are not familiar with Shizzow, it is a location-based social service that a small, yet dedicated, team of techies built with the goal of helping you build quality relationships through face-to-face interaction. Sharing some similarity with Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle and other location based services, Shizzow functions as a geo-location service that allows users to send “shouts” out of their location, which are subsequently passed on to friends through updates in several mediums. Originally limited for use by Portlanders, Shizzow recently went public in conjunction with the public release of their API.
Flickr has announced the release of two new Flickr API methods. The new methods are related to what are known as the Flickr Pandas, an experimental service where several virtual pandas select safe, public Flickr photos they consider interesting, or photos which have been geotagged.
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